Sandra Simonds, steal it back

When my friend told me he was in love with someone else,

              my thoughts turned to Greco-Roman models

for inspiration. Also, the letdown

            of milk since the body is relentless. A troll on Twitter.

It was snowing on all the arches, on the atrium, the four

          chambers of a chicken’s short-lived, factory-style heart.

The word “psalm” comes from the Greek word “to pluck

          a lyre.” Maybe I can address you now. My husband

will be furious. Coward. Liar. A voice says, “Alice, why did

            you have another baby?” Exercise:

                      reread the Ten Commandments (“Glass Box”)

I’m intrigued by the expansive surrealism in Georgia poet Sandra Simonds’ latest poetry title steal it back (Ardmore PA: Saturnalia Books, 2015). The author of Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University, 2012) and The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Simonds described her approach to poetry in her recent “12 or 20 questions” interview, writing:

For me poetry follows the logic of music and the logic of the body. I think you have to follow your ear in order for a poem to work—you know the hidden story that can only be told through blind faith in the sound.

The structure of her poems appear constructed as a series of accumulations, built as a montage of lines, thoughts and phrases that flow like endless, rushing water. The repetitions, cadences and rhythms are quite striking in poems such as the ten-section “Glass Box,” or the fourteen-section “The Lake Ella Variations,” that includes: “Oh little green apron boy with the crappy gray eyes, let’s watch / the sunrise over Georgia. Gave poetry book I hate five stars on Goodreads; I am / such a liar! / What if I step on a syringe and get a disease? / Who’s going to give me a lot of money so I can quit my day job and write this poetry?” Alternately, the seven-page “Occupying” is a single block of text, existing without punctuation but including capitals, suggesting new phrases and/or sentences, adding to, as opposed to slowing down, the inertia of the piece: “[…] I bet she is an excellent typist I bet she is a lot of things I bet she has been to yoga today I bet she is noble I bet she speaks in hushed tones I bet she is incredible I bet she is an incredible dancer I bet she is a lot of incredible things I bet she dances every night […]”

Simonds does seem to follow and favour rhythm and repetition, allowing certain phrases to echo and repeat, using repetition not as a way to hold the poem back but to hold elements of it together and to propel it forward, composing poems across a canvas far larger than the single page.

Today I paid my landlord

at the last possible minute

on the last possible day

of the month which is

on the 5^th day of the month.

It is the 5^th of November, 2012.

Poets hate their landlords.

This is an imperative. It has no grammar.

Maybe it has a crude grammar.

I am not writing the check until

the last possible minute

in my car because I have

so much hatred in my heart

for property and landlords

but not land or streams

since I love the Romantics

since I am also a romantic

when I am not practicing poetry

like going to TJ Maxx

and looking at my face.

I have been thinking

of the body of my three-year old

and how it is so new and unstable

and how I don’t want him to ever feel

happy in this world.

I don’t mean it like that.

I want him to feel joy

but not happy in the sense

that he feels content. (“A Poem for Landlords”)

There is a fierce intelligence and swagger to Simonds’ poetry, constructed with precision and an excess of wild energy; a poetry of rants, lectures, frustration, unease and pleading, passionate gestures. “I am writing this so quickly.” she writes, near the end of the piece “A Poem for Landlords,” a poem rife with domestic specifics and a rushed, harried breath. The poem ends: “I will post this on my blog / immediately.”